-Livemint.com Quality employment eludes majority of India’s university educated Last year, 2.3 million people, including postgraduates and PhDs, applied for 368 peon posts advertised in Uttar Pradesh. Outrage followed. Why were highly educated people applying for a job which required only primary school education and knowing how to ride a bicycle, people asked. To answer, one needs to find out the jobs people who have been through a university end up in. According...

-The Hindu While the Delhi government’s spirit of experimentation is to be lauded, the right lessons need to be learnt from the odd-even trial. It is now amply clear that no credible data supports the Delhi government’s claim that the odd-even trial has reduced pollution or improved air quality. In fact, the quality of air in the first week of January was worse compared to previous weeks. Data obtained from the National...

-The Hindu Atleast 40 faculty members from the IITs at Mumbai, Delhi, Khargapur and the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore have, as of Wednesday, signed the petition lambasting Free Basics — a Facebook initiative to offer free access to a few sites—as ‘misleading’and ‘flawed.’ They will be submitting the petition to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) on Wednesday. “Facebook’s ‘free basics’ (sic) proposal is such a lethal combination, having several...

-Hindustan Times Kota: Concerned over the rising number of students committing suicides, the Kota district administration and the city’s coaching institutes have begun taking corrective measures in an attempt to de-stress the students and instil positivity in them. The district administration has chalked out a strategy to reduce the pressure that students undergo, issuing several guidelines to coaching institutes including starting weekly offs for students, augmenting the number of counsellors, providing fees...

-The Indian Express The Central government’s move to fix cotton seed prices and trait fees sends wrong signals. 2015 will go down as a year that has seen all the rules of free trade being given the go-by when it comes to agriculture. The lead for it, significantly, has come from the Centre, whether in the form of not allowing exports of onion at below $ 700 a tonne or imposing stockholding...